Sisters Reunite After 61 Years

Sisters, Klara Blaier and Hannah Katz reunite, 2005

In 2005 sisters Klara Blaier and Hannah Katz were reunited after more than six decades after the granddaughter of one of the sisters conducted a search on Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.

Klara Blaier, 81, and Hannah Katz, 78, were born to the Weiss family in a village near the town of Mukachevo (better known as Munkacs by the Jewish community that once flourished there) in what was then Czechoslovakia. After the war broke out, their parents sent them to different relatives in Hungary. They last saw each other in 1944, after the Nazis occupied Hungary. Both survived camps and death marches, made aliya in 1948 and raised families just 45 miles apart. Both thought they were the only survivors from their families.

In January 2005, Hannah Katz’s granddaughter Merav Zamir decided to check if the Page of Testimony she submitted in 1999 for her great grandmother Sheindl Weiss (on behalf of her grandmother) was there. To her surprise, she found that besides her own, there was another Page of Testimony for Sheindl Weiss submitted by her daughter Klara Blaier in 1993. As far as Merav knew, her grandmother had no surviving siblings. She immediately contacted Yad Vashem, who then assisted the families in making contact.

After 61 years, Klara and Hannah were finally reunited. In a newspaper interview, Merav said:

“When I visited Auschwitz my life changed… my whole outlook was transformed. Now my life has changed again. I want to tell people never to give up—continue the search.”